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Sunday, 16 February 2014

Raiderland by SR Crockett reviewed by Julia Jones

S.R. Crockett describes Raiderland
as “a garrulous literary companion for Galloway lovers and Galloway
travellers.” It was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1904 by which time Crockett had been a best seller for ten years. He'd already
produced eleven of the novels that will soon be re-published in
Ayton Publishing's Galloway Collection and there would be a further fourteen before his death in France in April 1914. "Bear in mind," says series editor Cally Phillips, "that he was writing professionally in magazines for some ten years before he became published in book form and you will see that [Raiderland] is indeed no more than a snapshot of his work . But a beautiful and valuable snapshot it is."

The bare bones of Crockett's biography
are fascinating. He was born in Balmaghie 1859, the illegitimate son
of a dairy maid. For the first eight years of his life
he was brought up by his maternal grandparents at their farm in
Duchrae and was then educated in the small town of Castle Douglas. In
1876 he gained a Galloway Bursary to Edinburgh University where he
began writing as a way of supporting himself as he studied. This
seems to be an impressive educational trajectory and I rather
wonder whether it could have been replicated in England at the same
period? It's certainly a tribute to the moral and serious approach to
life fostered by rural Scottish Presbyterianism. Crockett's grandparents
were Cameronians - a section of the Scottish Covenanters who became a separate church after the religions settlement of 1690, refusing to take oaths of allegiance and continuing to object to the union between England and Scotland. Scottish religious dissent and factionalism
forms a major part of Crockett's fiction – especially where it's aligned
with political resistance to the age-old enemy, England. It may be that there is a current political message in the republication of Crockett's oeuvre at a time when the Union is again under scrutiny. Whether or not this is so, Raiderland offers a wonderful opportunity to glimpse dissent from the inside. After his
time at Edinburgh Crockett spent the best part of ten years as a Free
Church minister himself, resigning in 1895 to concentrate on his
writing.

Much of the early part of Raiderland
is autobiography through landscape. Crockett recreates his childhood self (“the Boy-who-Was”) in a somewhat Wordsworthian way, mentally revisiting the
landscape of his childhood and using it to rekindle memories of
“those bright days when the sun had not long risen and the feeling
of morning was in the blood.”

Here's his introduction to his grandparents' Duchrae
farmhouse: "The farm I know best is also the loveliest for
situation. It lies nestled in green holm crofts. The purple moors
ring it half round, north and south. To the eastward pine woods once
stood ranked and ready like battalions clad in indigo and Lincoln
green against the rising sun – that is until one fell year when the
woodmen swarmed all over the slopes and the ring of axes was heard
everywhere. The earliest scent I can remember is that of fresh pine
chips, among which my mother laid me as she and her brothers gathered
kindling among the yet unfallen giants.”

His first indoor memory is of lying in
his cradle in the farmhouse kitchen aware of his grandmother “padding
softly about in her list slippers (or houshens), baking farles of
cake on the girdle, the round plate of iron described by Foissart.
The doors and windows were open and without there spread that silence
in comparison with which the hush of kirkyard is almost company –
the silence of a Scottish farmyard in the first burst of harvest.”

There is no sense that Crockett suffered any stigma for his illegitimacy or
that he was anything other than a loved and cherished (though lonely)
child experiencing a particular rural mixture of freedom and
discipline. Raiderland proves that his senses remained wide
open to natural beauty throughout his life and his imagination ranged freely backwards and forwards in historical time. That small
detail of the girdle being “as described by Foissart” is
indicative of Crockett's awareness of the living history that
surrounded him.

The Galloway novels are set variously
from the 15th century onwards and Crockett finds many of his characters within his native landscape. Sometimes
he is explicit, linking the solitariness of his childhood to his
development of imaginary people – who were often not
imaginary at all but based on the adults around him, as in the following passage: “Chiefly I love the Crae Hill because
from there you get the best view of the Duchrae, where for years a
certain lonely child played and about which, in after years, so many
poor imaginings have worked themselves out. Here lived and loved on
Winsome Charteris – also a certain Maisie Lennox, with many and
many another. By the fireside night after night sat the original of
Silver Sand, relating stories with that shrewd and becoming twinkle
in his eye which told of humour and experience as deep as a draw-well
and wide as the brown-backed moors over which he had come.”

At
other places in the book Crockett simply segues into a relevant
passage from one or other of his novels, usually with the briefest of
historical notes. (I am assuming that the helpful titles in brackets have been added by the editor, Cally Phillips.) He tramps the hills and gazes down into the lochs
of both East and West Galloway and takes the reader with him,
delightfully. All of this is accessible to the English reader with
no prior knowledge of the area or of Crockett's fiction. There are occasional moments when one reaches for a glossary or when he delves a little too deep for the ignorant southerner. I admit that my eyes glazed over the c18th century diary of landowner William Cunninghame but I apologise for this as a sign of my own English weakness. Raiderland must be supremely rich for those with the relevant knowledge and I look forward to being able to access the original illustrations by Joseph Pennell on the Galloway Raiders website. I hope Raiderland will
be carried in backpacks as an explorers' field guide as well as providing an oblique and fascinating glimpse into the hinterland of a prolific, confident and successful novelist. Ayton Publishing are
clearly right to put Raiderland as the final volume, number
32, of their forthcoming collection yet it also serves as an
introduction to whet the appetite for the fiction that has made
Crockett's name.

For more information about S.R.Crockett and his books click HERE or to join 'The Galloway Raiders' click HERE